Friday, April 4, 2014

The Hearthstone Review No One Else Has the Courage to Write

I’ve been goaded into this.

PCGamesN wrote a review of Hearthstone on March 14th. Leaving aside all the factual inaccuracies in
the article, it paints Hearthstone as a rosy picture of online CCG Utopia. Conspicuous by its absence is the presence of
any words about the design of the base set of the game, which to my mind is the
key to any CCG, online or otherwise. So,
here I sit, looking at a 9/10 review focused exclusively on fluff, on the precipice
of a review that, apparently, takes a sense of nothing to lose on my Twitch
stream, Youtube channel, or website that was paid thousands of beta keys for a
glowing post release review. So here we
go. Fanbois, be warned: psychological
discomfort is about to ensue.

For the purposes of this review, I am going to weigh aspects
of Hearthstone to construct a final “rating” for Hearthstone.

Graphics, Sounds, and
other Fluff (4%): The game looks gorgeous; there’s no denying that. Hearthstone was designed to make the player
feel as if they are walking in to their local tavern in Azeroth to sit down for
several ales and some quick games of cards.
All of the little details are there: the ambient noise of a bustling
tavern, the friendly “Innkeeper” that serves as both carnival barker and AI
opponent in Practice mode. Selections in
the menus, purchases in the store, and actions on the battlefield all give
feedback that is effective and well within the flavor of Warcraft. With Hearthstone, Blizzard has shown that it
has interest in providing players with the little things that should keep
players coming back.

Hearthstone also has
the concept of foil cards in the form of “Golden” versions of cards. Here again, Blizzard’s attention to detail
shines through. Each golden card has
animated card art. In certain examples, the animated card points out aspects of
a card’s art the player might not notice; The Silver Hand Knight is being
pelted by arrows, which is extremely subtle in the base version of the card,
but the animated version makes the arrows the focus of the art. It is a nice touch that makes acquisition of golden
cards something to strive for.

It isn’t all sunshine and roses though. There are still annoying bugs that affect
game play to the point of being detrimental to the play experience. One example of this is a bug where the base
position of minions on the battlefield will change each time a player takes an
action. There are entire deck archetypes
that require precision on the position of minions on the battlefield in order
for the deck to be played optimally.

Verdict: We’ve come
to expect this from Blizz and they have not disappointed. The remaining bugs and specific
inconsistencies prevent a perfect score here, but not by much. 9.8/10

Technical Competence
(36%): Blizzard did a good job coding the rules of their CCG. Stealth creatures, in fact, cannot be
directly targeted or attacked by your opponent or his minions until the Stealth
creature attacks. Creatures with Divine
Shield always have the first hit of damage reduced to 0 and the Divine Shield
is always removed. Charge minions are
always unaffected by “Summoning Sickness”; Taunt creates must always be
attacked before other creatures or the hero are attacked, assuming the Taunt
creature is itself a valid target. Bonus
HPs on minions are always removed in accordance with the way damage assignment was
designed; damage assignment was a bad design decision, but design decisions
aren’t up for debate yet. What is up for
debate at this time is whether the Hearthstone development team coded the rules
for the game accurately relative to the way the rules were designed. All
indications are that they did—a significant feat for a first effort of
codifying a CCG.

There’s a catch,
however. That catch is shallowness. Hearthstone is
barely-get-the-bottom-of-your-feet-wet shallow.
First and foremost, Hearthstone is not
an interactive game by any standard of CCG interactivity; indeed, each player
gets to act with impunity on their turn--play what you want with no questions
asked. The only exception to this is
Secrets, which are played on your turn and triggered when specific conditions
are met. Unfortunately, not all classes
have

Secrets, and the pool of secrets is so small that playing a Secret is
anything but secret, and due to the lack of actual counter-play, players are
forced to attempt to use secrets to protect minions, instead of having the
flexibility to use spells to protect minions, secrets to protect minions, or
spells to protect secrets. Further, there
aren’t all that many minion abilities: Battlecry, Charge, Deathrattle, Divine
Shield, Enrage, Silence, Spell Power, and Taunt are all represented, but all
minion abilities are either continuous and passive, or 1 time use when the
minion comes into play. Minion abilities
that activate were, according to Eric Dodds’s 2014 GDC talk, too hard to code
into the game, so the depth that activated minion abilities would offer was
sacrificed on the altar of expediency and marketing. Because there are so few minion abilities,
there is no rule book; the rules for minion abilities are displayed on screen
when a card is highlighted. On first
glance, this is okay, but tread to any level past superficial in game, and
questions arise: what order do secrets resolve in if I have more than 1 in
play? What order to multiple Deathrattles resolve in? What game mode should a new player try to get
a feel for the game without being stomped through the floor by the Power 6? All of these questions would be answered if
Hearthstone had an…you guessed it: An online player’s guide/rulebook. As it stands, players are left to flounder
for themselves, or flock to the local Netdecking site to contract The Pox while
obtaining knowledge. It’s a shameful
oversight.

A second contributor to the shallowness of Hearthstone is
the lack of game variety. Currently,
there are three game modes: Arena, which
is Hearthstone’s attempt at a “draft-like” mode, Ranked, which is a brainless,
soulless cesspit of Netdecking, bravado, and bullshit, and Casual, which is
simultaneously the most rewarding play mode and the play mode missing the most
options.

The draft system implemented in Arena gives the player 30
choices of 3 cards of similar rarity, selected at random from the breadth of
Hearthstone’s wide but meager base set.
The rarity of the cards to be chosen at random is itself random:
sometimes you get to choose multiple Legendary rarity cards, other times, you
get 1 Epic rarity card and a bunch of junk Rares. After the draft, the player plays a series of
games against players of similar record until the player has achieved 12 wins,
or endured 3 losses. Gold, dust, and
cards are the reward at the end of the Arena run, and those rewards increase as
the number of wins the player achieves increases.

In Ranked play, players start at a base “ranking” and earn
points for wins. Points are taken away
for losses. Manage to go on a winning
streak, and acquire bonus points. Get
enough points and increase in Rank, until you get to Legend rank, where you are
safe from having to try anymore, as Legend rank does not decay until the end of
the “season”. Players are matched up
with players of similar rank, and it has to be said that the system works in
all but extreme cases. That said, the
negatives of Ranked are immediate and glaring.
Instead of utilizing its vast resources on curtailing netdecking to
preserve the integrity of what CCGs are: 50% deck building and 50% playing your
decks, Blizzard chose to vigorously encourage netdecking by throwing thousands
and thousands of beta keys at netdecking websites for marketing

purposes. This has turned what should have been the
most rewarding game mode in Hearthstone into the least rewarding mode in
Hearthstone. Choose to brave Ranked and
be pitted against Netdeck, after Netdeck, after Netdeck, after Netdeck, after
Netdeck, and so on. Win entitlement has
driven creativity out of the mode entirely.
Blizzard knows it, too, which is why it has tied a bunch of cosmetic
rewards and the false promise of implied Blizzcon invites (http://tinyurl.com/k5pveo5)
exclusively to Ranked as bait to get players to wade into the sewage.

The last mode is Casual, and I said it is the most
rewarding. By that, I mean you will see
more creativity in decks in Casual mode in 5 games than you will see throughout
a 5 week Ranked season. It would be easy
at this point to aggressively recommend to players to avoid Ranked in favor of
Casual at all costs; however, Casual mode is missing all the variants that make
CCGs great: 2-headed giant, emperor,
grand melee, and “attack left, defend right” are all missing from Casual
mode. There’s been rumors of “Adventure”
mode, which would be played by multiple players against an as yet undisclosed
opponent. I can’t understand how so many
variants of casual CCG play can be missing from a CCG advertised as, “A fast-paced
strategy card game for everyone.”

In order to have a chance in Casual or Ranked, you need
cards. Cards are acquired either by cash
purchase (2.99 for 1 pack with discounts for large pack purchases), or by gold
purchase (100 gold per pack). Gold acquisition
is slow. 3 wins gets the player 10 gold, and this is supplemented by a Daily
Quest system with rewards for individual quests that range from 40 to 100
gold. Up to 3 Daily Quests can be active
at a time, and 1 Daily Quest per day can be “abandoned” and replaced. Gold acquisition works the way it is supposed
to, though the rate of gold acquisition is a source of many debates on the
Hearthstone forums.

Verdict: Hearthstone
is a technically competent game, but that’s a function of how shallow it
is. Hearthstone is also missing too many
Casual Mode CCG variants to get a high rating here: 5/10

Core Set Design (60%): Settle in, because we have a lot to talk
about, and our discussion has to start in December 1993, with the release of
Magic: The Gathering Unlimited Edition. Unlimited
was released in December 1993 as a white-bordered version of the cards
released in the M:TG Beta. Included
in this set are some of the most infamous cards throughout the history of
Magic: Black Lotus, the Moxes, Time Walk, Timetwister, and Ancestral Recall,
colloquially referred to as “The Power 9”.
Unlimited was only printed for
4 months, with April 1994’s Revised
Edition replacing Unlimited. The M:TG Illustrated Encyclopedia says Revised was released to update the rule
set with errata issued since August 1993; conspicuously, The Power 9 were left
out of Revised. At this point, we learned the First Rule of
CCG Club: Don’t have a Power 9.

Returning to the
present, on January 16th Eric Dodds made a news post discussing the
thought processes behind why Blizzard might change cards. It’s a great post for players, as the post
gives a set of standards that players can apply to card sets as they come out
and provide feedback on cards and card interactions that create a game state
that is outside Blizzard’s stated goals for Hearthstone. It is true that some of the bullet points in
the document are more esoteric than others, but it cannot be denied that the
document contains standards that can be objectively applied to the core
set. Further, since specific cards were
mentioned in this document, we can use the document as the basis for
corollaries to be objectively applied to the core set. An example of this is the nerf to
Pyroblast. Pyroblast deals 10 damage to
1 target; initially it had a cost of 8 mana.
It was determined that dealing 10 damage on Turn 8 followed by 10 damage
on Turn 9 by back-to-back Pyroblasts was frustrating players, and causing “non-interactive”
games. The corollary we can draw from
this is one of damage output: Dealing 20 damage over 2 turns starting on Turn 8
from any amount of board presence is frustrating to play against and
non-interactive; conversely, dealing 20 damage over 2 turns starting on Turn 10
is okay. This is important, because
without Dodds’s news post and the corollaries derived from it, we would be
forced to flail about and debate the “OP-ness” of cards and combos.

Before we get into specific cards and how they violate the
Dodds news post, let’s take a step back and look at the core set overall. Each class has a set of cards specifically
flavored for that class. For example,
Hunters cast WoW Hunter spells like Arcane Shot and Multi Shot. Similar is done
with other classes to create a class specific flavor different from the other
classes, and there are a set of Neutral minions that any class can use in
decks. Inside the class paradigm, the
core set has 2 distinct sets of cards: Basic cards and Expert cards.

The Neutral Basic
cards are mostly weak-sauce cousins of more powerful and rare minions, or
replacements for direct damage spells that a class might not have access
to. There are a few notable exceptions
to the overall rule that Neutral Basic cards are trash, and there are some
beyond trash bad Neutral Basic cards.

In general, Class Cards are always more powerful than
Neutral Cards of the same cost and rarity.
Blizzard did an excellent job with providing each class with some
specific kit that fits into the core of most decks that class is going to run.
Indeed, one spell derided for being “OP” is the Priest Basic card Mind
Control. The Class Basic cards also
serve their purpose of establishing the flavor of the classes well. The Rogue’s Basic kit has direct hero damage,
card draw, bounce, and hard removal in it, while the Warlock Basic kit has
demons, life steal, direct damage, and hard removal in it.

The Neutral Expert cards are more rare and powerful versions
of the Basic Cards. The cards come in 4
rarities: common, rare, epic, and legendary.
Rarity and power go hand-in-hand in typical CCG fashion with a few
exceptions. All told, a superficial
analysis of the cards would lead a casual observer to think that Ben Brode and
Eric Dodds took on the impossible task of maintaining class uniqueness,
Warcraft flavor, and traditional CCG balance and passed it with flying colors.
Except, of course, they didn’t.

There are holes in the core set design of Hearthstone all
over the place, and I’ll only touch on a few of those here. Remember when I mentioned the first rule of
CCG club? The most glaring design flaw
in Hearthstone’s core set in the existence of a Power 6: Ragnaros, Ysera, Caire,
Sylvanis, Leeroy, and Alexstrasza. Of
the 6, only Leeroy can be countered by single cards across all classes. For example, Sylvanis has a Deathrattle of
the following: Take control of a random enemy minion. Therefore, if a player has established
control of the board, and the

player’s opponent plays a Turn 6 Sylvanis, the
player with board control must sacrifice at least 2 cards to counter her: 1 to
silence the deathrattle, and at least 1 card to kill Sylvanis. The alternative is to run multiple creatures
into Sylvanis in an attempt to render her Deathrattle useless; however, making
that choice makes Sylvanis’s
deathrattle even more powerful by reversing or negating the board control state. To put it in perspective, a 5/5 creature in
Hearthstone costs roughly 5 mana. Sylvanis’s deathrattle comes in spell form in
a Priest class basic card called Mind Control.
The original casting cost of Mind Control was 8 mana; consequently, I’m
getting 5 mana worth of creature that casts an 8 mana spell when it dies. I can do all this on Turn 5 with The Coin, or
Turn 6. The best counter for the card is
to have 1 of your own. The same can be
said for Ragnaros, Ysera, Alexstrasza, and Caire: all of these cards require at
least 2 cards to counter them, and each will swing games. Imagine what happens when a player with none
of these cards is matched up with a player who has more than 1 of these.

Leeroy Jenkins almost deserves a review all on his own. He’s a 6/2 minion with charge that has a
Battlecry of Summon 2 1/1 whelps for the opponent. On paper, he’s a 0 sum game, neutral equivalent
Mage Fireball card. If he were ever to
be used in a conventional sense, that would be accurate; however, that’s not
how he’s used. Leeroy Jenkins is the key
component in several combos that are in direct contravention of the following
bullet point from Eric Dodds’s Card Balance Philosophy document: Cards and combinations that can kill your
opponent from a high amount of Health without any minions starting on the board
are also not very interactive…

The combos kill players from over half life, and most are
available as early as Turn 7. Further, all of these combos are kill combos, so
the supposed “drawback” of summoning 2 1/1 creatures for the opponent turns out
to not be a drawback at all in practice.
At this point, one would think it would be intuitively obvious that
Leeroy Jenkins needs to be looked at, if for nothing else, than to come up with
some sort of drawback for playing Leeroy Jenkins so he can’t be a part of a kill
combo from high health. Hearthstone has
been through 2 patch cycles since the Card Balance Philosophy is out, and the
design team has been silent on the Leeroy Jenkins issue.

Finally, let’s talk
Alexstrasza. To start, she’s an 8/8 for
9 mana, which on its face wouldn’t seem like a very good deal. The catch is her Battlecry: Set a hero’s
remaining health to 15. There’s a
hypothetical 15 damage hidden in this card.
Alexstrasza is potentially a Pyroblast, and just shy of a Fireball, plus
an 8/8 creature, for 9 mana. I imagine
the designers thought she’d be used as the neutral equivalent of the Warlock
legendary Jarraxus, which has the effect of healing the hero that plays him to
15, amongst other things, but she sees far more play in an offensive capacity
as a setup for the coup de grace the next turn.
So, to recap: Pyroblast at 8 mana was not interactive and un-fun, but a
Pyroblast plus an 8/8 creature for 9 mana is super fun and interactive,
apparently.

So, to simultaneously sum up how bad the core set design is
as well as highlight how unequally the Card Balance Philosophy document has
been applied to the core set, think about this.
Any hope of being able to play a minionless deck went out the window
when the Mage was given the back-to-back nerf treatment. First, Freeze spells
that would be the key defensive component of any minionless deck were hammered
through the floor. Second, Pyroblast,
which would be the Mage’s win condition cards in a minionless deck, was nerfed
through the floor. Yet, a card that has
the potential of having a Pyroblast or more for a Battlecry goes
unchanged. Deck archetypes that rely on
combos that kill opponents from a high amount of health continue to exist in
direct violation of the Dodds news post, while minionless archetypes that would
render at least 1 of the aforementioned combos inert was nerfed into
unplayability.

Most disappointing of all this is that the last 800 words is
only the tip of the iceberg. Minions
with Charge are significantly better across the mana range than Taunt Minions
are; there are no neutral common counters to legendary cards, specifically the
Power 6; the entire base set feels like it was designed over a weekend in wine
country based on the premise, “How do we make people overspend on card packs?”

Verdict: A CCG is
only as good as its base set. There are
some neat ideas in Hearthstone’s base set, but most of the fun concepts aren’t
powerful enough to contend against netdecks in Ranked, and too much of the base
set design ignores 20 years of CCG design lessons learned: 2/10

FINAL SCORE:
(9.8*.04)+(5*.36)+(2*.6) = 3.4/10

Final
Thoughts: Hearthstone
has a lot of potential, both for the players and for Blizzard. The base set design needs work; the community
is abusive to anyone with a suggestion to make the game better, regardless of
how well reasoned the change is; and the feature set in woefully
incomplete. Fix those three things, and
the sky is the limit for this game. That
said, the marketing and business development people at Blizzard aren’t stupid,
so they know they can slap the Blizzard name on any old crap and it will sell
(WoW since 2008, Diablo 3 before it was finished with ROS, Hearthstone in its
current form), so there is little motivation for the money men/women to
motivate Brode and Dodds to learn how to design a CCG. As it stands for the layman, this game is
worth an hour of your time every 3 or so days, when your daily quest log is
full, exploiting combos that should have been removed from the game 6 months
ago to stockpile gold and dust to acquire the Power 6 from the base set and
inevitable expansions. Beyond that,
Hearthstone is another disappointment brought to you by your friends at
Blizzard.

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